Through a discussion of two important texts by Kant and Lenin, Luke Mergner explores how our ideas about public intellectuals are tied to different models of social and political authority. The public sphere is defined by the tension between democracy and intellectual authority. How can anyone claiming the role of the public intellectual find alternative critical languages when the egalitarian democratic spaces of the public sphere are withering away?

Evgeny Morozov’s newest book is best read as marginalia rather than as any systematic contribution to a social theory of technology. It is a book very much of the moment, focused on challenging the mistakes of a narrow field of interlocutors, all of whom publish, like Morozov, on the fashionable topic of technology journalism.

Contrivers’ Review is an online journal of theory and criticism. Though our first issue self-reflexively questioned the value of “intellectual” work, one crucial aspect of our description has yet to undergo much scrutiny—namely, the adjectives “online” or “digital.”

We accept that labor is necessary on some elemental level for survival and are habituated to the capitalist organization of labor that exchanges labor for income. Something about the ubiquity of work makes it difficult for us to see it as something other than a natural, inevitable part of everyday life. But middle-class, educated workers are awakening to the reality that work resembles the precarious, austere, back-breaking conditions of the global poor rather than providing a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

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Contrivers’ Review is a non-profit digital publication featuring essays, book
reviews, and interviews. Its primary mission is to reconnect the highly
professionalized discourses of the humanities and social theory with broader
and more diverse audiences. Contrivers’ Review takes seriously the task of
critique, while remaining respectful of the limits of theory’s ambitions.